Crème brûlée all gone!

I finally can share my crème brûlée pictures. My little sister was such a sweetheart. She went out and got me....

It's crème brûlée torch!!! You can't miss it, it even has it printed on the damn thing. I never had one and never needed one, but still very happy to have one now. Just to bad she didn't buy a gas refill and due to safety reasons they sold it empty. Which we found out when I actually wanted to use it. So the next day little sis went back to the store to get a gas refill. That night it was a crème brûlée feast!

Before I had the torch I put the ramekins under the grill. I think my grill is not working proper, because after 10 minutes this was the result. The crème brûlée had sort of a nice sugar crust (not all the sugar burned), but the whole thing got warm also. And I like my crème brûlée cold! So anyone who doesn't have a torch yet, ask one for your birthday or invest in one. It is so much better!

This is how it looks when you use your torch. I sprinkled a small layer of powdered sugar on top of my cold crème brûlée. Then I used the torch to melt the sugar and to brown it a little. I don't like it too brown, so this was just right for me. Too brown (or black) will taste bitter and ruin the whole dish.

Just the way it should be. Nice and crunchy sugar layer on silky smooth cream.

Every spoon was such a delight.

I had to make sure I got every little piece. If I could I would've licked the bowl =)

Extra note from the hubby: I need to make sure that I get the crème brûlée ramekins so that he gets more sugar surface. Next time's investment...crème brûlée ramakins.

Crème brûlée meets Spain

Today was both a good day as well as a bad day. It started when I woke up this morning one hour later then normal. Due to daylight saving we lost one hour of our day and somehow this day went by faster then normal.

I made little apple cinnamon and blueberry pancakes for breakfast. Not everything in one but two different fillings for one kind of batter. This is the first time I made pancakes from scratch. Normally I buy the pancake batter where I only have to add some milk or eggs. This time I had to make it from scratch. I used plain wheat flower, one egg, some milk, some ricotta cheese and a pinch of yeast. This batter I separated in two bowls so that I could add chopped apples and raisins in one and blueberries in the other.

This is my first time using ricotta cheese. I see it in the supermarket all the time, but since I am not a big fan of cheese I never bought it. For this pancake recipe I thought I give it a try. It really made my pancakes light and fluffy.

After dinner I wanted to use all the milk I had before it expired. I searched for a crema catalana recipe in one of my cook books and started cooking. First I put a pan of milk on the stove together with some orange peal and some sugar. Then in another pan in made the caramel sauce by heating sugar and just when it chanced color I added 2 table spoons of orange juice.

After all the suger and orange juice blended together I poured it into ramekins and squeezed some more drops of orance juice on top. That was not a good move, because after that the sugar didn’t set. 

I left it to cool anyway. Who knows I might still be able to work with it.

In the meantime I wisked 6 eggs and 4 egg yolks together and added the warm milk to the eggs, a little bit at a time to prefend having scrambled eggs. The mixture looked really runny and I don’t know what I was thinking, but I put everything back on the stove. And of course everything turned to scrambled eggs. Such a waiste! My poor sink, I had to pour everthing through it before the hubby sees it. What to do, what to do…

Since I already had the caramel sauce in the ramakins and I still had some whipping cream in the fridge I deceded to not let the rest go to waist and try to make crème brûlée. I tried it once and that didn’t work out well. This time I tried to stick as close as the recipe I could.

For this crème brûlée I used:

-          500 ml whipping cream

-          4 egg yolks

-          3 table spoons of sugar

-          1 package vanilla sugar or a couple drops of vanilla essence

-          Some drops of fresh orange juice

I sacrifice 4 eggs, using only the yolk. Added three table spoons of sugar, some vanilla sugar and some drops of orange juice and creamed it all together till it was pale yellow and double the volume. 

I heated the whipping cream till it almost cooked and slowly added it to the egg cream. This time I poured it straight into the ramekins. No more messing around.

The ramekins were in a backing tray with water half way up. The oven was heated on 160 degrees (not Fahrenheit) and I put the ramekins in for 30 minutes, after that I increased it to another 15 minutes. When I took them out I was so exited to see that it was still wiggly, but firmed up enough. I still covered them with some foil, just so they can cook a little bit longer.

It almost looks like I pooled it off. Can’t tell you how they taste yet. They are sitting in my fridge as we speak. Luckily it is midnight now; otherwise one of the 6 might disappear, in my belly…

Tomorrow will be a good day for sure. I’ll have my crème brûlée waiting for me. And don't worry, I'll be sharing pictures =)